Bio
Both an accomplished scholar and a prominent public intellectual, Yarimar Bonilla is a leading voice on questions of race, history, and political culture across the Americas.
Yarimar Bonilla is a political anthropologist, writer, and filmmaker whose work examines empire, colonialism, and political possibility across Puerto Rico, the Caribbean, and the Americas. A professor at Princeton University and Contributing Opinion Writer for The New York Times, she works across ethnography, history, journalism, documentary film, and digital scholarship.
Her first book, Non-Sovereign Futures, draws on ethnographic research in the French Caribbean to rethink prevailing assumptions about sovereignty, nationalism, and political freedom. Her subsequent work has focused increasingly on Puerto Rico, examining disaster, austerity, territorial governance, and struggles over the island’s political future. Her books include Aftershocks of Disaster, co-edited with Marisol LeBrón, and Post-Disaster Futures, co-edited with Isabel Guzzardo, alongside documentary projects including Aftershocks of Disaster: The Film and the Emmy award winning Privatized Resilience.
As a Contributing Opinion Writer for The New York Times and columnist for Puerto Rico’s El Nuevo Día, Bonilla writes about subjects ranging from Bad Bunny, Jennifer Lopez, and West Side Story to hurricanes, infrastructure, colonialism, and U.S. empire. Her public writing brings contemporary cultural and political debates into conversation with longer histories of American power and the unresolved place of colonialism within U.S. democracy.
Bonilla co-founded the Puerto Rico Syllabus, served as Interim Director of the Center for Puerto Rican Studies (CENTRO) at Hunter College, and was a producer and co-creator of the Emmy-nominated documentary series Puerto Rican Voices.
Across these different forms, her work centers Puerto Rico and the Caribbean not as peripheral or exceptional cases, but as critical sites for understanding the histories, institutions, and political contradictions of the Americas.
Yarimar Bonilla is a political anthropologist, writer, and filmmaker whose work examines empire, colonialism, and political possibility across Puerto Rico, the Caribbean, and the Americas. A professor at Princeton University and Contributing Opinion Writer for The New York Times, she works across ethnography, history, journalism, documentary film, and digital scholarship.
Her first book, Non-Sovereign Futures, draws on ethnographic research in the French Caribbean to rethink prevailing assumptions about sovereignty, nationalism, and political freedom. Her subsequent work has focused increasingly on Puerto Rico, examining disaster, austerity, territorial governance, and struggles over the island’s political future. Her books include Aftershocks of Disaster, co-edited with Marisol LeBrón, and Post-Disaster Futures, co-edited with Isabel Guzzardo, alongside documentary projects including Aftershocks of Disaster: The Film and the Emmy award winning Privatized Resilience.
As a Contributing Opinion Writer for The New York Times and columnist for Puerto Rico’s El Nuevo Día, Bonilla writes about subjects ranging from Bad Bunny, Jennifer Lopez, and West Side Story to hurricanes, infrastructure, colonialism, and U.S. empire. Her public writing brings contemporary cultural and political debates into conversation with longer histories of American power and the unresolved place of colonialism within U.S. democracy.
Bonilla co-founded the Puerto Rico Syllabus, served as Interim Director of the Center for Puerto Rican Studies (CENTRO) at Hunter College, and was a producer and co-creator of the Emmy-nominated documentary series Puerto Rican Voices.
Across these different forms, her work centers Puerto Rico and the Caribbean not as peripheral or exceptional cases, but as critical sites for understanding the histories, institutions, and political contradictions of the Americas.